I first used an Apple IIe in an afterschool program when I was 7. I learned the rudiments of BASIC and wrote a bunch of spaghetti GOTOs. I woke up this morning and thought it'd be nice to write a little "happy birthday" BASIC program and throw it up on social media to celebrate Apple's 50th. Quick, easy, fun. Then I wanted to verify that it worked, but didn't want to do it with a GUI program…I needed to see it in green on black! So, I got a little more ambitious, and decided I'd make a BASIC interpreter in modern Swift.

Here it is, along with a few sample programs, including Steve Jobs' 1975 Atari Horoscope Program that Adafruit recreated earlier this year.

I recommend using the Apple II font to keep it real.

New to BASIC? The package includes a Tutorial and Language Reference in the DocC documentation — open Package.swift in Xcode and build documentation (Product > Build Documentation) to browse them. The tutorial is written so my 7-year-old can follow along.

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